izigame.me

Oh boy what a disappointment,
I really wanted to love the game and the start was most promising, but over the course of either, the main campaign and the conquest mode, cracks begin to open, the deeper you dive in.
It's clear that the product was rushed to release at some point.
And all of that although the campaign is basically better than in the first game in my opinion, there is more mission variety and in-game dialouges during the battles, the story also has more dramatic moments.
While the game promises 4 main scenarios, most polish was spent in the first one where you play the mouse faction. The Felheim and the pirate campaign on the other hand are much shorter than I initially expected, while they still retain some variety, the balancing of the missions is bonkers. You're faced partly with trivial scenarios that only get slightly more difficult when you aim for the optional stars, which unlike the first game are now requirement-based instead of performance-based.
First I liked the idea, but at some point it felt like a crutch to excuse the lack of difficulty in most missions and even then while sometimes requirements in fact can make a mission more interesting, there are also a lots of annoying ones where you have to stall the outcome of the battle. Missions like "kill 10 enemy units with unit xy" or having to ignore the enemy commander / killing them with a certain unit and so on. These are sorts of restrictions, which don't add any depth to the particular scenario in my book.
It feels especially pointless given the fact that you can fulfill both requirements one-by-one, the game doesn't even recognize if you beat them all in one go. The game also doesn't recognize on which difficulty you fulfill these annoying missions. So basically completion this time feels just like a matter of time investment and it's not like that the stars give you anything special unlike in the first game where you can unlock artworks, lore, commanders and the epilouge. It feels utter meaningless this time.
The cake takes the last "campaign" which are basically just 2 missions. All that build-up in the story only so it suddenly rushes to its conclusion which makes it feel most unnatural. There are even descriptions of the missions missing. It feels like you're playing a beta of an unfinished campaign.
Despite having more variety and great ideas the end result feels ultimatively unsatisfying, as both missions and story feel rushed during the second half of the game.
Another game mode that greatly suffers in the second half is the conquest mode. The new rouge-lite game mode.
While I generally appreciated the attempt and admiting it makes up for some fun rounds making the game feel fresh and different, the balancing can be bogus at some point.
One aspect is the terrible enemy AI which runs willingly in your attack range, resulting in an cowardly playstyle as dominant strategy, yet the stakes in the felheim and cherrystone conquest campaign are quite skewed in favour to the player. This changes with the pirate conquest, where you now suddenly have to juggle between naval and land units.
The problem is in order to recruit naval units you have to encounter an harbor, but the map in this conquest campaign doesn't indicate if you approach a harbor or some new building where you can transform your land units to naval units, resulting in the same amount of units, just different.
This is quite problematic as in conquest you are dependend on a large enough troop size when you eventually enter the final event. Yet it's perfectly possible to not come across a single harbor in this campaign as its impossible to tell which of the "harbor events" feature true harbors and not just that transmutation building.
The fourth conquest campaign for the gloomwood forest ruins is even worse. Its possible to encounter a flying miniboss without the game giving the opportunity to obtain anti-air units with the starting formation. So I was playing through 2 maps, without a possibility to buy new units. (and even then, which units you can buy is up to RNG too) only to face an unwinable scenario. So the whole run was basically unwinable from the start, without the player being able to notice it. This is a HUUUUUGE oversight and feels pretty amateurish. This shows that the later parts of the conquest campaign weren't properly playtested as well.
The game is already out a few weeks and this problem still persists.
But EVEN WORSE, given the time the game is out, it's still impossible to upload custom campaigns. Basically the biggest pillar of the game, the powerful level editor, is highly restricted. If you go online look at the user creations, you will see most of the time only skirmish maps, more than anyone could ever play or would have interest in it.
But there is not a single campaign because if you try to upload yours, it gets stuck in an infinite loop.
There is another problem with puzzle maps. You are able to upload puzzle maps, but there is no option to play them, I suppose that's because in the predecessor you could play puzzle maps on the corresponding puzzle mode, which is missing in Wargroove 2.
So yeah either puzzle maps, nor custom campaigns can be played. This goes on for weeks now and the developers decide to put their focus on different aspects, good riddance, the game basically doesn't work right now big features are basically broken. At the time this becomes fixed, people probably have moved on already.
I don't even have to mention that community management is basically non-existant. The whole tab for sharing levels is as simplistic as in the first game, there is a featured list, but it's empty since release.
So yeah I could mention tons of other problems that plague the game right now and will become hopefully fixed in the future, but these are by far the biggest ones that make me wonder why they still exist.
This game was released too early, the framework stands yes, but there are numerous problems that kinda shoo me away, although I wanted to like the game so much. If they could've spend at least half a year more the product might've felt more finished, but as it stands right now this should've been in early access.
For me it's clear I made a custom campaign but when the time comes that I can finally upload it I most likely won't care anymore, because I moved on.